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Is Your Small Business A Success?
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Article 1: How to Understand Success
“Show me the money,” goes the popular saying. The implication is clear: It’s all very nice to get slaps on the back, receive professional awards, form friendships with new people, and participate in other exciting business activities. But at the end of the day the bottom line is king. Anyone who makes lots of money has achieved an enviable degree of success.
Many people find out the hard way, though, that a healthy bottom line and a fat bank account are not sufficient for success.
Success is a feeling that we have inside, that we become attuned to recognizing, and that we feed and grow. This feeling is the realization that our lives are in tune with our personal values.
By extension, a successful business is one that allows us to exercise our personal values in a productive way.
If our business doesn’t allow this creative projection, we become miserable. Look at what happened to Dr. Kathleen Hall, author of “A Life in Balance: Nourishing the Four Roots of True Happiness” (AMACOM, 2006).
Dr. Hall spent many years as a self-described “success junkie.” She had a high pressure job on Wall Street and pursued a money-based definition of success. Only one trouble: She was miserable.
“My bank account was big, but my life was falling apart,” she says. “I didn’t like myself.”
Dr. Hall’s problem was that her business activities didn’t reflect her inner values. She quit her job, moved to a log cabin in the countryside, and created a new speaking and consulting career that allowed her to be true to herself. In other words, she brought her business activities in line with her personal values.
Many of us are like Dr. Hall. We keep going in a business that doesn’t represent our nature. We do so by hypnotizing ourselves into a state of satisfaction by concentrating on the bottom line. Often, this is because we’re trying to satisfy other people.
“We have been brainwashed to think success means fame, fortune, power and status,” says Ed Brodow, author of “Beating the Success Trap” (Harper Collins, 2004). “The problem is that people spend their lives chasing those things and when they get them they have a sense of emptiness because their real needs remain unfulfilled.”
Those who take this empty road end up at an unpleasant destination, warns Brodow.
“People who opt for the default definition of success all too often wind up depressed, disillusioned, and addicted to drugs, food, sex, or violence.”
In contrast, people who recognize their own definitions of success find true contentment.
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Is Your Small Business A Success?
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